What Has Globalisation Ever Done For Me?

What systemic change is needed for genuine sustainability? Environment Just how reliant are we on our international community? Chris Andrews tells a story - A few days ago I had a punctured tyre on my bicycle and ended up buying a new tyre. This got me thinking about the dichotomy of uncontrolled unmanaged collapse, and controlled intentional degrowth. My bicycle is way more environmentally friendly than a car; it’s even better than public transport; that’s because it’s made with minimal materials that mostly have a long life, and it uses no fossil fuel to operate it (at least, it wouldn't if I didn't eat food that is heavily embodied with fossil fuel energy.) As in many aspects of modern life, I didn’t, and couldn’t, make my own replacement tyre, so I bought a new tyre made in a presumed huge factory in Asia. So, while my bicycle may be environmentally friendly in itself, like any industrial product, even simple ones, it requires the existence of an industrial society to enable me to keep using it, which greatly reduces its environmental qualifications. This fact applies to any industrial products that we may use to support our existence: from cars, tractors, guns, rotary hoes, chainsaws, horse tack, hand gardening tools, even nails and screws. If we allow an uncontrolled and unmanaged social collapse to happen all those industrial products that we rely on will, like my bicycle, quickly become useless. One claimed solution to this problem is to put aside a store of all of the industrial products that we use so that, in the event of an uncontrolled collapse, we have them available. However, when all the tools in that stockpile wear out as they must, (the more complex ones such as cars, and chainsaws and even bicycles will certainly go first and early), we won’t be able to replace them and will lose the functionality that they provide for us to do the tasks that we need to do. If we are really well prepared we may just be able to make some of the simpler tools from scratch. To do this we will need a supply of metal ores, as well as access the vast amounts of energy that the metal processing takes. People have been making metal tools for thousands of years, so this is definitely possible if we have these resources, but we will also need knowledge and skills, and many of those skills barely exist anymore in the modern industrial world. If we find that we can’t make these metal tools, we will make do with hard wood, animal bones, or shaped stone for cutting edges. Does that sound familiar? We’ve arrived back at the Stone Age! The alternative to recreating the Stone Age is to plan a controlled intentional degrowth to a much reduced, sustainable-sized, but still industrial society, which will be able supply us with the things we need to give us as comfortable, secure, and healthy life as possible. I have no idea about just how much of a comfortable, secure, and healthy lifestyle we will be able to sustainably setup, but trying to find this out and then achieving this lifestyle has got to be better than allowing humanity to go to a neo-stone age!

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